Trump Hired Them, Then He Called Them Incompetent

Anthony Scaramucci is the latest former Trump official to draw his old boss’s ire.
Photo: NBC NewsWire/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Forget the deep state and Robert Mueller’s team of “angry Democrats” — there’s another force working to undermine the Trump administration from within. Someone who’s put complete idiots in vital positions of power. Someone who’s entrusted major administration initiatives to halfwits. Someone who, despite promising to hire the “best people,” keeps having to fire incompetents. That someone is Donald Trump.

Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci is the latest Trump hire to earn a presidential insult. Once an “important” member of the administration who Trump had “great respect for,” the Mooch is now a “not job.” What changed? Scaramucci, who was against Trump before he was with Trump, has returned to his anti-Trump roots.

The pattern is familiar by now: Trump praises someone when he hires them and dumps on them once he’s fired them or, in some cases, before that. Any normal person might hesitate to publicly contradict their initial assessment to avoid exposing their terrible judgement. But that’s too complicated an idea for Trump, who believes people are brilliant when they do what he wants and “weak,” “wacky,” “clueless” “morons” when they don’t.

Michael Cohen

Before: When Cohen first entered his orbit, Trump was still three years away from starting @realDonaldTrump, so he didn’t publicly lavish Cohen with praise. Still, it’s clear that Trump liked Cohen, whom he once called “a fine person with a wonderful family.”

After: Cohen left the Trump Organization in January 2017, but it took a while for his former boss to sour on him. August 22, 2018, was the big day. That’s when Trump tweeted: “If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!” He’d later call Cohen, who worked for the Trump Organization for over a decade, “a weak person,” “not a very smart person,” a “bad lawyer,” and “a fraudster.”

Steve Bannon

Before: In August 2016, Bannon became Trump’s third campaign manager, and he’d stick by him through Election Day. After Trump’s win, the former head of Breitbart News transitioned into the role of chief strategist, which Trump created just for him. Bannon, and all of his shirts, hung around until August 2017, when Trump gave him the parting gift: a tweet calling him “tough and smart.”

After: By January 2018, Trump had turned on Bannon, branding him “Sloppy Steve” after the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, in which Bannon was extensively quoted. Bannon, Trump tweeted, “cried when he got fired and begged for his job.”

Omarosa Manigault Newman

Before: The former Apprentice contestant, whom Trump once called a “loyal friend,” was a trusted enough confidante to work as the Trump campaign’s director of African-American outreach and then land a job in his White House.

After: Once she was booted from the Office of Public Liaison by former White House chief of staff John Kelly and began criticizing Trump, he turned on her quickly. She became a “not smart” “lowlife” and earned the nickname “wacky Omarosa.” Trump added that he’d only kept her around because she said nice things about him.

Jerome Powell

Before: In November 2017, Trump passed over Janet Yellen for a second term as chair of the Federal Reserve, appointing Jerome Powell in her place. “He’s strong, he’s committed, he’s smart,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden. “I am confident that with Jay as a wise steward of the Federal Reserve, it will have the leadership it needs in the years to come.”

After: Once Powell had spent a year on the job, Trump reportedly wanted to fire him. He denied it, but six months later he could no longer hide his contempt. “As usual, Powell let us down,” Trump tweeted in July. Now? Powell is “clueless” and “letting us down.”

Anthony Scaramucci

Before: The Mooch was anti-Trump before he was pro-Trump, aligning first with Scott Walker and then Jeb Bush in the 2016 primaries. By the time Trump had secured the nomination, the man who’d once called Trump a “hack” joined his team. In the summer of 2017, Trump repaid Scaramucci’s loyalty by hiring him as White House communications director. “Anthony is a person I have great respect for, and he will be an important addition to this administration,” Trump said at the time.

After: Scaramucci lasted 11 days in the job and returned to his anti-Trump roots in 2019. Now that he’s putting together a team of anti-Trump Republicans, the man who was once put in charge of promoting the administration’s message is “totally incapable” and “a highly unstable ‘nut job.’”

Jeff Sessions

Before: One of the first major politicians to back Trump’s campaign, Sessions was rewarded with the job of attorney general. But after committing the original sin of recusing himself from the Russia probe, Sessions was no longer worthy of Trump’s praise.

Rex Tillerson

Before: When Trump was first considering Tillerson for the role of secretary of State back in December 2016, he tweeted that the former ExxonMobil CEO was a “world class player and dealmaker.” Two days later, Trump made his decision, tweeting that he’d “chosen one of the truly great business leaders of the world, Rex Tillerson,” for the job. And two months after that, following Tillerson’s confirmation, Trump declared that he would “be a star!”

The nation’s top intelligence official is illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint, possibly to protect President Donald Trump or senior White House officials, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff alleged Friday.

Schiff issued a subpoena for the complaint, accusing acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire of taking extraordinary steps to withhold the complaint from Congress, even after the intel community’s inspector general characterized the complaint as credible and of “urgent concern.”

“A Director of National Intelligence has never prevented a properly submitted whistleblower complaint that the [inspector general] determined to be credible and urgent from being provided to the congressional intelligence committees. Never,” Schiff said in a statement. “This raises serious concerns about whether White House, Department of Justice or other executive branch officials are trying to prevent a legitimate whistleblower complaint from reaching its intended recipient, the Congress, in order to cover up serious misconduct.”

Schiff indicated that he learned the matter involved “potentially privileged communications by persons outside the Intelligence Community,” raising the specter that it is “being withheld to protect the President or other Administration officials.”

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group on Saturday attacked two plants at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including the world’s biggest petroleum processing facility, in a strike that three sources said had disrupted output and exports.

Two sources close to the matter said 5 million barrels per day of crude production had been impacted — close to half of the kingdom’s output or 5% of global oil supply.

The pre-dawn drone attack on the Saudi Aramco facilities set off several fires, although the kingdom, the world’s largest oil exporter, later said these were brought under control.

Candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination are sprinting from coast to coast in search of campaign donations over the next 18 days, moving urgently to stockpile cash for their big fall push — and to avoid a death spiral that a weak third-quarter fundraising tally might prompt. …

Still, Democratic donors have expressed nervousness in recent weeks that some presidential hopefuls could post disappointing totals, compounding the candidates’ broader struggles. July and August tend to be slow for fundraising, with many people on vacation and tuned out of politics. The large and unpredictably fluid field also has made it difficult for donors to commit to a candidate.

“The third quarter number, from a finance standpoint, will define the narrative throughout the course of the fall, when these questions about viability for so many of the candidates are so real, especially in the second and third tiers,” said Rufus Gifford, the finance director for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaignand a donor to at least three candidates so far this year.

While MIT engages in damage control following revelations the university’s Media Lab accepted millions of dollars in funding from Jeffrey Epstein, a renowned computer scientist at the university has fanned the flames by apparently going out of his way to defend the accused sex trafficker—and child pornography in general.

Richard Stallman has been hailed as one of the most influential computer scientists around today and honored with a slew of awards and honorary doctorates, but his eminence in the academic computer science community came into question Friday afternoon when purportedly leaked email excerpts showed him suggesting one of Epstein’s alleged victims was “entirely willing.”

An MIT engineering alumna, Selam Jie Gano, published a blog post calling for Stallman’s removal from the university in light of his comments, along with excerpts from the email in which Stallman appeared to defend both Epstein and Marvin Minsky, a lauded cognitive scientist and founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab who was accused of assaulting Virginia Giuffre.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young liberal icon from New York, has endorsed Senator Ed Markey’s reelection bid next year, as Representative Joe Kennedy III considers challenging Markey for what promises to be the nation’s most competitive congressional primary.

Ocasio-Cortez and Markey have worked together as the primary sponsors of the Green New Deal, the signature legislative issue for both lawmakers.

ABC’s coverage of the 10-candidate forum draws the largest preliminary ratings for any debate so far this cycle.

ABC and Univision scored strong ratings Thursday with their coverage of the third Democratic presidential primary debate.

The debate, featuring 10 candidates and current frontrunners Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren sharing the stage for the first time, drew a 10.0 household rating in Nielsen’s 56 metered markets. That’s 23 percent higher than the 8.1 NBC got for part two of the first debate on June 27, but about 25 percent lower than combined metered-market average for NBC and MSNBC. That telecast ended up with 18.1 million viewers across NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo.

Beginning speech to Concerned Women of America, @SecPompeo says “this is such a beautiful hotel. The guy who owns it must gonna be successful along the way,” he says, without mentioning @realDonaldTrump by name. “That was for the Washington Post,” he says of his remark. pic.twitter.com/vPYp9vYE9y

Child care, a key issue for many Americans, is getting little attention at the debates

Millions of Americans struggle to find decent, affordable child care every year. But when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tried to bring up the subject during Thursday’s Democratic debate, in response to a question about education, a moderator cut her off.

“Start with our babies by providing universal child care for every baby age 0 to 5, universal pre-K for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in this country,” Warren said, just getting on a roll when ABC moderator Linsey Davis interrupted. “Thank you, senator,” Davis said.

Davis was just following the rules: Warren’s time for the response had lapsed. But the moment was a perfect metaphor for the attention child care and other work-family issues have gotten in these debates ― or, more accurately, the attention they have not gotten in these debates.

After the debate, Castro is being criticized for his kamikaze attack on Biden, while journalists are toiling away trying to transcribe Biden’s “record player” response

Biden was asked whether he still held these attitudes: “What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?” What follows is a transcript of his rambling answer (I have omitted nothing), which for some reason includes references to record players and Venezuela:

Well, they have to deal with the — look, there’s institutional segregation in this country. From the time I got involved, I started dealing with that. Redlining banks, making sure we are in a position where — look, you talk about education. I propose is we take the very poor schools, triple the amount of money we spend from $15 to $45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise to the $60,000 level.

Number two, make sure that we bring in to help the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home, we have one school psychologist for every 1,500 kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are — I’m married to a teacher, my deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. Make sure that every single child does, in fact, have 3, 4 and 5-year-olds go to school. Not day care, school.

Social workers help parents deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t know what to play the radio, make sure the television — excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the — make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school — a very poor background will hear 4 million words fewer spoken by the time we get there.